My posting speed is always slow, which prevents me from commenting on the events of the day, as I usually don’t know what I think until they become the events of last week. I am therefore the Last Blogger On Earth® to comment on the MT 3.0 pricing debacle.
I have only two things to add to Liz’s excellent observations:
First, most of the analyses have focussed on the users, as if MT were a word processor whose main value was to individuals. Seen in this light, the users complaining about the changes are behaving childishly.
However, that’s what users always do in this situation — the reaction is baked in. The problem is not with these particular users, it would be with any group of users in a similar situation. Weblogging tools are community enablers, and when you create community, you engage people’s emotions. Period. Community membership precedes rationality, both historically (all higher primates are social) and literally (children attach to their families before they can talk.)
The dilemma for people who build communal tools is this: if you want something that hooks people emotionally, you cannot have rational users, and vice-versa. And when you build a tool that helps create a social fabric, changes to the tool trigger social anxieties. Always. (See the Fuck Fotolog thread from last year.)
The second, narrower point is to the suggestion that since MT 2.x still works and is still free, nothing has changed. This is nonsense, for two reasons: First, MT is not merely a piece of code, it is a ticket into a community. I still use an ancient version of emacs, because its personal software, not social software, and what other people do or don’t do with emacs doesn’t affect me. MT does not have those characteristics — what other people are using matters, and splitting the 2.x and 3.x trees creates two classes of users.
And this is the other reason the “2.x is still free” argument is nonsense: if other people are better off, you are worse off.
This one is hard to understand, because classical economics denies that it is true. Classical economics, however, is wrong: if your neighbor wins the lottery, you are worse off.
There are all sorts of arguments for why this isn’t true, or shouldn’t be true, but none of those arguments matter. We have a set of emotions like jealousy and envy that are decisively negative and triggered by other people enjoying things we don’t have access to.
This matters for the creators of social software because one of the standard “Launch now, make money later” plans is to add Gold Membership, with enhanced services. This should be a winning strategy — the old users are no worse off, but the new users pay premium prices for premium services. The problem with this, in a social context, is that it creates a class system where some people are visibly better off than others. Classical economics tells us this is not a problem, but the users seem not to have gotten that message.
This is not to say that MT shouldn’t charge for their product — we use it here, and I’m assuming we’ll upgrade when the time comes. It is to say, though, that because MT has succeeded in creating social value, you cannot expect users to act rationally to change. If you want users to really care about a piece of social software, they will invest in it emotionally. If you change the bargain they think they are operating under, even if that bargain is merely implicit and obviously unsupportable and even if you have the absolute and unilateral right to change it, they will freak out.
This reaction is part of the social weather, and like the real weather, complaining about it is both immensely satisfying and basically useless.
1. Brian M. Dennis on May 18, 2004 10:40 PM writes...
I fail to see how MT is distinguised from emacs in this case. What specifically about MT is *inherently* affected by how other people use it? I use a 2.3ish edition of MT with no comments and no trackbacks. Works fine as a weblog tool. Emits RSS well enough to get me into the syndication sphere and people seem to find me, at least judging by e-mail.
Frankly, every piece of software is a ticket into a community that can become enflamed with emotion. Heck, even creaky old emacs went through a contentious fork (Emacs/XEmacs) when certain users weren't getting what they wanted out of RMS.
Permalink to Comment2. Clay Shirky on May 19, 2004 7:28 AM writes...
There are two ways, one technological and one social:
MT is affected by how other people use it because instances of MT talk to one another, and to the outside world, and that conversation is affected by what version you're running. You've opted out of trackbacks and comments, but that doesn't mean other people have. In fact, the people likeliest to be concerned about MT on the communal front are people for whom those features are vital.
The second difference between MT and emacs is communal. Your desire to know how they differ "inherently" suggests a belief that when two pieces of software differ, that difference should be locatable in the source code, but that obscures the effects of community. Emacs would beat HydraSubEtaEdit hands down in any feature comparison, but the communal effects of Rendezvous make SubEta a different kind of tool than emacs.
So with MT -- because the weblog world is in part conversational, MT creates a solidarity good among its users that emacs does not. The fights with rms were all among the rabbis; here, the magnitude of the backlash includes people who can't tell perl from php, because a fork in the codebase is not just a fork in the developer community, its a fork in the user community, threatening the solidarity good.
Permalink to Comment3. Ryan on May 19, 2004 8:35 AM writes...
Your point about people acting irrational in relation to things they make an emotional attachment to is very insightful. I'm often trying to articulate a similar idea about music.
I would disagree however that emotional attachment is really the prime motivator in all this MT3 drama. Rather it's classical economic price elasticity issue. People hate it when the price goes up, especially for software. When it does, they look for substitute goods and whine.
Permalink to Comment4. Ryan on May 19, 2004 8:36 AM writes...
Your point about people acting irrational in relation to things they make an emotional attachment to is very insightful. I'm often trying to articulate a similar idea about music.
I would disagree however that emotional attachment is really the prime motivator in all this MT3 drama. Rather it's classical economic price elasticity issue. People hate it when the price goes up, especially for software. When it does, they look for substitute goods and whine.
Permalink to Comment5. Brian M. Dennis on May 19, 2004 1:25 PM writes...
I still think trying to distinguish "social" software for this discussion is incorrect.
To flip your example, as the Swiss Army Chainsaw of text editors, I used to use emacs as a Usenet reader and an e-mail reader. Quit a few people do to this day. Emacs has tight integration with CVS, a form of collaborative tool between programmers. Yeah, it's a text editor, but it did a whole lot of talking to other stuff. Maybe not emacs instances, but communication infrastructure nonetheless. Emacs users are developers, but not every user was invested in the guts of Emacs. Yet many chimed in on what they wanted when Emacs underwent radical change. Most didn't know e-lisp from a hole in the ground. I think the arguments went a little beyond the rabbis.
I understand that SubEthaEdit is a different tool. Its (and MT's) features don't in any way make its community different from the tribes that rise up around text editors, e-mail programs, IRC tools, IM tools, Wiki software, image editors, etc. Some of these tools don't directly provide a "communal" feature set, but communities stil build around them.
My thesis is that if one looked at a number of case studies of software that underwent radical feature changes or license shifts, you'd see the same dynamics SixApart is encountering. IMHO. (No judgment from this end whether said behavior is rational or irrational).
Cheers!!
Permalink to Comment6. Clay Shirky on May 20, 2004 7:39 AM writes...
::sigh:: Forgot emacs was the Swiss Army Chainsaw...
So now you've said "MT and emacs are quite similar, if you use none of the social features of MT and all of the social features of emacs", which is of course true, but only because you've minimized their differences in use.
And sure, communities build up around all sorts of things -- not just software, but cars, foods, etc. But changing the car (or the car's pricing) doesn't change the medium in which the community talks to one another.
_My thesis is that if one looked at a number of case studies of software that underwent radical feature changes or license shifts, you’d see the same dynamics SixApart is encountering._
I disagree, obviously. I've lived through a number of licensing changes, from Oracle to iTunes, and a number of communal alterations, from LambdaMOO to fotolog, and the community fights are hotter and less rational.
I think both the social anxiety triggered and the feedback loop of having the discussion _in the product that's being changed_ creates a different and more emotional kind of pushback.
Permalink to Comment7. xian on May 20, 2004 1:00 PM writes...
There may have been more light than heat in the first wave of reaction to the MT3 price-schedule plan - definitely some people jumped to conclusions or didn't read the fine print, but from the cacophony a kind of community consensus emerged fairly rapidly (perhaps not in Internet terms but in real terms) that marginalized the crybabies who never wanted to pay for anything and brought to light the real issues of an unaddressed class of users (hobbyists, experimenters, early adopters, evangelists, etc. - ironically many of these people are the same developers this release is intended to target).
I'm not convinced of the irrationality of the uproar, when all was said and done. In the midst of the range of opinions and the range of reading-comprehension skills displayed was a fairly wide, hard-to-ignore message that 6A had made a serious mistake and failed to communicate well with the most vocal and perhaps the most influential part of the userbase.
Permalink to Comment8. JamesJayTrouble on May 20, 2004 7:37 PM writes...
Uhhh... ...mmm... ...
Nup.
;-D
Permalink to Comment9. Chris L on May 21, 2004 1:02 PM writes...
This is exactly what I was getting at in my weblog a week ago when I wrote: In the most interesting column is the uproar that partially comes from the kind of software MT is. The premise and success of MT is that it enables easy, personal publishing. There are commercial ventures that use it, but its base is the hundreds of thousands of personal blogs that have not just used it, but wrote about it, created plugins for it, and generally made it a fixture in a very personal part of their lives. Whether intentionally or not, MT was considered to be a "good guy" supporting the egalitarian blogosphere, a contributor to the community not just a "software corporation."
Is it any surprise, then, that there is such vilification going on?
Permalink to Comment10. Taran on May 24, 2004 10:49 AM writes...
MovableType is just a tool. For some people's needs, it is the right tool. For other people's needs, it is not.
For my needs, it is not. But then again, I see blogging as a subset of writing.
Strangely, I could not use my main site url - k-n-o-w-p-r-o-s-e.com, without hyphens, because r-o-s-e is questionable content.
When flowers become questionable, perhaps you need a new tool.
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